Sermon: Service is our Prayer: The origins of the UUCP covenant Emrys Staton Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix 4/17/2016

Transcription

1 Sermon: Service is our Prayer: The origins of the UUCP covenant Emrys Staton Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix 4/17/ Reading - the original 1947 covenant of the First Unitarian Church of Phoenix In the love of truth, and in the spirit of Jesus, We unite for the worship of God And the service of man. Love is the doctrine of this church, The quest for truth is its sacrament, And service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace; To seek knowledge in freedom; To serve mankind in fellowship; Thus do we covenant with each other. Sermon: In 1933, in the midst of the depression and midway between the two great world wars, a book was published by a Boston press by one L. Griswold Williams containing a compilation of 101 responsive readings - a resource to be used for material in church worship services. And tucked away in the back, after the 101 readings and before the acknowledgements and index was a single page which was titled A Covenant. Rev. Williams covenant is the basis of the words we used today at the beginning of our service, 83 years later. The words that Ellie just shared with us, as she said, were an adaptation of the Williams covenant that this congregation adopted at its founding in These words were not necessarily a unique creation of Rev. Williams, but instead showed an evolution of religious language that was used by Unitarian and Universalist communities. This is what we will explore a bit today.

2 During the 1800s, both Unitarianism and Universalism enjoyed significant growth in the United States, as well as into Canada. Unitarianism was usually more urban-centered on the east coast, while Universalism spread through the rural farms and countryside. Both denominations maintained a strong foothold in New England, but then expanded into the frontier of the midwest following the settlers and homesteaders that were occupying traditional indigenous lands. As it spread, both Unitarians and Universalists found that they were consistently questioning the tenets of Christian faith. Already, both were deemed heretical for their core theological beliefs. The Unitarians rejected belief in the trinity, and claimed Jesus to be a mortal man with practical teachings instead of a divine being who shared an essence with God. And the Universalists rejected the belief of heaven and hell and judgement, instead preaching a message of universal love and salvation. The search for truth was lifted up over and over again, which prompted liberal religious thinkers to question other long-held beliefs based on the bible - until finally, some started to abandon it all together. Which left ministers of Unitarian and Universalist churches in a bit of a conundrum. How could they still consider themselves to be a church, or a religion, at all? The pressure came from the outside and the inside to figure out how to remain legitimate within a majority Christian society, and to also advance new teachings based on growing humanist and transcendental thought. And so, ministers and theologians went through great pains to come up with language that thwarted criticism while also putting forth their beliefs and vision. That language is preserved through UU history in a list of various covenants and affirmations of belief. Since this month is also focused on the theme of service - related to the line in our covenant that says service is our prayer, so we ll see how the the concept of service changes over time. 2

3 3 I ll start in 1865, at the close of the civil war. In an effort to bring together the nation s Unitarian movement, a convention was held in New York with delegates from over 200 churches attending. Part of their work was practical - fundraising, opening new churches and revitalizing those that closed during the civil war. The convention s other purpose was to deal with a theological divide between conservative and radical factions among Unitarians. The conservatives wrote and passed a statement of purpose, which read: Whereas, the great opportunities and demands for Christian labor and consecration at this time increase our sense of the obligations of all disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ to prove their faith by self-denial and by the devotion of their lives and possessions to the service of God and the building up of the Kingdom of his Son, therefore, the Christian churches of the Unitarian faith here assembled unite themselves in a common body to the end of reorganizing and stimulating the denomination with which they are connected to the largest exertions in the cause of Christian faith and work. As you can tell, this was a very lofty, Christian-centric statement, and its passing greatly upset the growing radical voice, leading to several schisms in Unitarianism. The conservative group had hoped to keep close affiliation with Christianity. The radical group saw Unitarianism as a religion without the need for creeds or statements of belief. They proposed it should uphold free thought and critical thinking, and might not even require a strict Christian confession. The split between the two sides continued into the 1900s, where the radical faction, growing in numbers and influence, eventually won out. As an example of the evolution of thought, fifteen years after that statement of faith was adopted, Unitarian minister Charles Gordon Ames wrote a short covenant that read: In the freedom of truth, and in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we united for the worship of God and the service of Man.

4 Here we see that shift in theology away from serving God and instead serving among ourselves as humans. Then moving forward another fourteen years to 1894, Unitarian Minister James Blake wrote a covenant that is still common today - this version is used by our sister congregation in Surprise: Love is the spirit of this church, and service is its law. This is our great covenant: to dwell together in peace, to seek the truth in love, and to help one another. Notice that it starts with love, and there is no reference to explicitly Christian language around God or Christ. This version clearly shows the swing towards noncreedal humanism, which ultimately won out among Unitarians going into the 1900s. And this brings us back to our protagonist, the Universalist minister L. Griswold Williams. Williams attended a Universalist seminary in Pennsylvania, but was expelled because of his support for striking Italian factory workers in He still became a circuit preacher in Ohio, and started his career at the time when America was considering joining the great war raging in Europe. Williams opposed the war effort based on his observation that it was the working class who were sent to fight and die for a cause brought forth by the ruling class. He continued to write, preach, and speak against the war until he was fired from his church in Ohio. He then moved to take a pulpit in New York for a short time, before joining a group of Quaker pacifists who, as conscientious objectors, traveled to France to help rebuild homes with the newly forming American Friends Service Committee. After the war ended and he settled back into Universalist ministry, Rev. Williams began to write and publish. Building upon existing Unitarian language, combined with his own Universalist training and Quaker influence, Rev. Williams penned the following covenant and published it in his book in 1933: 4

5 5 Love is the doctrine of this church, the quest of truth is its sacrament and service is its prayer. To dwell together in peace, to seek knowledge in freedom, to serve mankind in fellowship, to the end that all souls shall grow into harmony with the divine, thus do we covenant with each other and with God. This congregation the a modified form of Williams covenant that Ellie read at its founding in With the help of our unofficial congregational historian, Charlotte Carl-Mitchel, we have some of the history of how the language evolved here. First, the references to God and the divine were dropped off. We don t know exactly when, but by the time this building was built in 1961, that language was gone, as evidenced by the bronze plaque by the front doors. The next big question about our covenant came in the 1970s, as the feminist movement was gaining strength and calling out the male-centric language that had been customary to use. In 1977, at the Unitarian Universalist Association s national General Assembly meeting, a motion was passed that called on all UU s to examine its language and address sexist terms in all our language, including hymnals, sermons, job titles, and covenants. This congregation started a discussion to examine the line to serve mankind in fellowship and see how it could be updated. Records show that the topic was discussed at the June annual meeting in 1980, where it was sent back to a committee, who then proposed a special congregational meeting in October to revisit the issue and take a vote. Several alternatives were proposed, and the congregation took a survey to see which ones they liked the best. In October, the covenant committee presented the

6 6 new line, to share our strength in kinship. They still couldn t come to a decision, and decided to push it off for another month to solicit further feedback. In the end, the congregation adopted the line to share our strength in fellowship. Ellie Murphy, who was working here as a church administrator at the time, told me that those words were her suggestion. So we started with a fully Christian statement of faith in the 1860s, which said we were to serve God with all our possessions. That changed to the worship of God and the service of man, then to serve mankind with a covenant with God, to our present day version - no God, service is our prayer, and sharing strength in fellowship. You can imagine that when the language of this covenant was written in 1933, it was a clever way of subverting the dominant christian culture. While many Christian communities were working hard to prove that their teachings and interpretations of church doctrine were the most accurate and biblically sound, we said simply that love is our doctrine. No contested hebrew or greek translations to deal with on that. And while many Christian groups retained sacraments like Eucharist, Baptism, Matrimony, and Penance, we moved away from those practices and said that the quest for truth is our sacrament. Discovering new truths, new knowledge, is for us, equivalent to a holy ritual. While many christian groups were trying to figure out how to change the circumstances of their lives, if they were pre-destined to be in the place they were, or if they needed to find the proper way to reach out to God to improve their situation, we simply said, service is our prayer. We are active in our world, with free will and agency, and the ability to tackle social issues with our own time and skills. With this language, we had a way to legitimize ourselves and define ourselves as a valid religion. It reflected a clever twist in the way that doctrine, sacrament and prayer was commonly thought of. And it was quite appealing to many people -

7 7 evidenced by the large number of UU congregations adopted some version of that language for their own use. Now it is How does this sound to us today? I wonder if we need to hold onto the the clever twist of Christian language in order to define who we are and what beliefs bind us together. We now look to many sources of religious and spiritual and philosophical wisdom. And my sense is that we don t have the social pressure to prove ourselves as a legitimate religious or spiritual community. Far be it for me, the intern, to really suggest that we, perhaps, re-visit the language covenant. But I wonder Could there be concepts from Buddhism, Wicca, Quantum Physics, Sufi Mysticism, or Critical Race Theory that might inspire covenantal language? Is the covenant feminist enough, anti-racist enough, or inclusive enough? We ve come a long way in 150 years - and I didn t even reach back into 16 or 17 hundreds to look at the language used then by Unitarians and Universalists. The covenant serves to help define who we are as a community, and it is also supposed to be the language we hold each other accountable to as members of this community. For now, I enjoy what we use. I appreciate knowing that the person who wrote the words was someone who lived his own values through love, service, and seeking truth. Today, I m grateful to L. Griswold Williams for the original draft. I m grateful to the feminists for insisting on modifying it. And I m grateful to this community at UUCP for keeping it alive all these years.